


wait for me (i'll come find you)

by orphan_account



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Drama, M/M, Post-Canon, Suicide, euphemised suicide, waiting fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-23
Updated: 2013-09-23
Packaged: 2017-12-27 11:08:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/978117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Forever wait inside the sea for me, Merlin hears Arthur murmur. (PG-13, 950 words)</p>
            </blockquote>





	wait for me (i'll come find you)

**Author's Note:**

> Just a quick something. Doesn’t necessarily make sense. As always, lots of pseudo-poetical bull. This is Merlin who’s waiting and eventually grows tired of it. And Merlin who’s making me depressive as hell ‘cos fuck. Jesus. /sobs/

you speak in every curling wave  
and sing in every violent breeze  
someday not far away from here  
my dear  
i swear i’ll see you

[la dispute—fall down and never get up again ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYk3wmHpzqk)

 

He sleeps deeply.

The world is transient, and he wanders it with heavy, stumbling steps. Through wide fields of corn, stretching upright tall and green. Along rocky shores of desolate beaches, curving around a sea that is calm and serene. Across vast deserts, the sand blistering beneath his soles. Over soft green grass, walls of stone towering old and derelict by his side. One scene blurs into the next after his third, fourth step, and he barely catches the roughness of a corn leaf beneath his thumb, or the scent of the sea water with his nose, salty and fresh. 

Still he walks a long while. The field becomes the shore becomes the desert becomes the grass becomes the field again: they switch so suddenly that he has soon forgotten what they looked like at all. Instead, colours begin flooding in on his mind, an explosion of iridescence that dips his surroundings into surreality. When he looks next, through the sheen of soap bubbles glazing over his eyes, the shore harbours a sea of desert sand, and from between the corn leaves gape little towers of stone; the soft green grass becomes the rocks from the shore, and he walks over them until his feet hurt and bleed bursts of butterflies.

It seems like a dream, but he knows it’s not. For one, he’s half-conscious here (wherever ‘here’ is). He knows he’s walking, he knows he’s looking for something, he knows he’s sleeping. For another, he feels his heartbeat. It pulses not within but outside him, dull surges of pressure filling the space around him, substituting the air that is God’s breath. He is a leaf in the wind, fluttering into whichever direction the gushes of pressure force him. He is lead sinking underneath the water’s surface to the bottom, and the air in his lungs is the pressure swamping over him, causing the fine branches of his lung arteries to implode.

He is drowning. There is no air. His own heart beat is the butcher seeking to slaughter him.

 _Thud_ it goes, from regular _thud thud_ to fast _thudthudthud_ to slow _t h u d_ , and each time it aches. It’s not a dream. His heart beat is everwyhere. He is suffocating. On water, on air. On his own will to live. Faster, faster it pulses, outside him, shoving him into the sea of sand until his throat is raw and clogged up with the harsh grains. He can’t fight against it. He is slowing down. Becoming immobile. Becoming the sweep hand of a clock ticking into eternity. The clock is counting the forever past. The forever present. The forever future. Stuck in time. He’s stuck in time. Doesn’t know where he is. There are the lights of a vast city skycrapers’ shimmering against the night’s canvas like buzzing fireflies glowing between the towering trees of a primeval forest. There are yellowing pages of a disintegrating manuscript in a scientist’s hands resounding the decadent echoes of a bard’s baritone in a king’s great hall. The smoothness of a motorway street digs into his heels with the blunt edges of roughly hewn stones.

He sees cities underwater. Villages underwater. The sky underwater. The sky is an eye is two eyes is a face is a person is a stranger is a friend is a never-lover is a loss is a hope is an obsession is a curse is waiting underwater. Merlin is drowning, his heart wielding the knife that is slicing open his throat. He is drowning for centuries, except it’s not him, it’s the echo of what he’s lost and he’s hearing its sound, is hearing it still, mellifluous, deceptive, a breath a poison in his chest. 

His body is slow, slow, a sinking weight, the ache of losing himself so pleasant, so sweetly relieving. His heart beat recedes like shadows fading with sunrise. He lies back, indifference sweeping over him like honeyed warm milk over a sore throat. His wounds are closing. There is no need to wait anymore, now. It’s over, at last.

The numbness feels strangely like contentment, and he wants to stay here forever. The ocean is blue and deep above him, and underneath his stretched limbs grass begins to grow, the sand becomes fresh earth, and a tree two three four five ten twenty trees grow from the earth to tower, tower, tower tall and proud and old. The fish are birds are chirping are singing long-forgotten prophecies in memory of him, another him, odes to deeds he has never done because he couldn’t have because his gift is no longer. But there is no bitterness here, in this forest underwater, there is no fear here, no fear of loss or drowning because the ocean is the sky is an eye is two eyes opening at last is a face smiling is a person is a friend no longer waiting is a never-lover still is a stranger now is an obsession is a curse is home—

 _Is it?_ , he wonders, eyes opening to the sky opening above him, parting the water asunder. _Is it home?_ , he wonders, chest swelling with the sudden rush of oxygen into his lungs, violent and brutal.

Is it? Is it home?

 _Yes, it is_ , the blue—the underwater sky that is a face that he shouldn’t know but does—whispers to him. 

Yes, it is, Merlin realises as he opens his mouth in a smile, acquiescing. As the water pours itself down his throat, into his chest, into his lungs, all Merlin hears is Arthur’s voice, calling, beckoning him to stay, to wait.

 _Forever wait inside the sea for me_ , the waves murmur as they drown him, gently, softly, and Merlin does.

He does.


End file.
